Saved! (12A)

AFTER the success of Being John Malkovich, Michael Stipe of REM and producer Sandy Stern received a flood of scripts from would-be screenwriters who fancied that their scripts were as audacious and wacky as that improbable success.

AFTER the success of Being John Malkovich, Michael Stipe of REM and producer Sandy Stern received a flood of scripts from would-be screenwriters who fancied that their scripts were as audacious and wacky as that improbable success.

Among the pile, they found the script for this sprightly and original twist on the well-worn teen-comedy genre.

It's set at the American Eagle Christian High School, where all the pupils are avowedly and devotedly Christians of the fundamentalist persuasion.

Top of the heap and in their final year are the bossy Hilary Faye (played by pop star Mandy Moore) and her friend Mary (Jena Malone). But when Mary's boyfriend tells her he's gay and she has a vision of Jesus telling her to "do everything she can to help him", the result is that, to her horror, she finds herself pregnant.

Forced to question everything she'd hitherto believed in and turned against by Hilary Faye and her acolytes, Mary finds herself befriended by the high school's other pariahs, including Hilary Faye's cynical, wheelchair-bound brother, the rebellious Cassandra (Eva Amurri), and the disbelieving, skateboarding principal's son Patrick (Almost Famous' Patrick Fugit).

It would have been easy enough to make a broad comedy, lampooning the Christian beliefs of most of the film's major characters.

But Saved! miraculously avoids that temptation, showing its characters instead as human and flawed but looking for love and friendship as well as a higher purpose in their lives. It also, incidentally, manages to be very funny and, in fact, Saved! is something of a blessing in disguise.